"Faux is the second keen-eyed anatomist I've read (the first being Michael Perelman) to identify the opening salvo in the current US class war as being fired in a little-noted episode -- i.e., in 1971 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce galvanized American capitalists into concerted political action when it circulated a confidential strategic memo entitled "Attack on the Free Enterprise System" by corporate lawyer (later Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell."
Carl,
At the History News Network site there's a piece by Dave Johnson that gets into this. Here's an excerpt:
http://www.hnn.us/articles/1244.html
Some History of the Conservative Movement
In 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce circulated a memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell among business leaders which claimed that "the American economic system" of business and free markets was "under broad attack" by "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." Powell argued that those engaged in this attack come from "the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians."
According to the Powell memo, the key to solving this problem was to get business people to "confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management" by building organizations that will use "careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." It helped immeasurably, Powell noted, that the boards of trustees of universities "overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system," and that most of the media "are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the free enterprise system to survive."
Powell wrote that these organizations should employ a "faculty of scholars" to publish in journals, write "books, paperbacks and pamphlets," with speakers and a speaker's bureau, as well as develop organizations to evaluate textbooks, and engage in a "long range effort" to correct the purported imbalances in campus faculties. "The television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance." Powell said that this effort must also target the judicial system.